Vivitar V3800N 35mm SLR Camera

A look through the current
B&H photographic company's catalog contained an old artifact that this old
newspaper reporter/photographer had seen a lot of at one time. It was a manually
operated 35mm single lens reflex camera that used film, just the type that had
been in use by practically all of the newspapers in the United States during
the time I had been a reporter. More specifically, it was a Vivitar V3800N,
advertised in the B&H catalog as coming with a 28 to 70 millimeter zoom
lens in kit form.

I had been looking for that
type of camera because things
have gotten to the point that local camera
stores no longer stock SLR film cameras. You
can find plenty of those little pocket digital cameras that look
like something Rube Goldberg cooked up, but don't resemble a real camera, at
least to somebody who started taking
pictures with a 35mm SLR. You can find plenty of
digital SLR cameras today in local camera shops, which look like
the old film SLR's but are actually something quite different.

Don't get me wrong. Those
little pocket type digitals do get
the job done, and are much quicker to get prints or images from
than the old film cameras were and still are (if you can still
find a film SLR). All you have to do with one of the pocket
cameras is set it on automatic, which in effect makes it a
digital point and shoot camera, go through the drill of framing
the shot, pressing the shutter and then taking the camera back to
your PC at home to load the images onto the computer. Nothing
could be easier or quicker. At times, I have been hard pressed
to see the difference between an eight-mega pixel digital print
and a 35mm film camera print.

Chances are you can get just
as good of images and prints
out of a digital SLR, especially the ones with more than an eight
mega pixel capability. However, the initial cost of those cameras is
high, and the added personal expense of that proposition is that
you have to relearn how to use an SLR camera, even to the point
of the terminology being used in the camera's manual. I always
thought the term RAW, for instance, referred to one possible
condition that shrimp could exist in rather than something that
referred to how a camera operated, for instance.

You get the message. I am one
of those old dinosaurs who
spent most of his photographic incarnation using those film SLR's.
In the current day and age, it takes much less time from when you
actually click the shutter (or what passes for it) to the time
you send the image out to a customer on a computer via the
Internet. This is due to just having to upload the images onto
the computer and then telling the computer to send it to a
specific email address. With a film camera, you have the added
step of having to get the film developed, then having either a
print or digitized images made depending on how you plan to get
the images to the final customer, like a newspaper or magazine.

Back when I started using a
camera in newspaper work, all we had
to use were the old manual film SLR's. The working newsman who
normally had to use the camera in a big hurry, at such
occurrences as fires, gunfights, traffic accidents and
the like. This meant that you could not re-stage each and every
shot if you thought you got the focus slightly off, or the
exposure was not quite kosher.

Nope, you normally had to
come screeching up on the scene,
grab the camera as you scooted out of the car, then start
automatically sizing up the lighting, lay of the land and other
variables as your feet hit the ground. Was it bright sunlight or
was there cloud cover, which directly affected the available
light and the camera settings? Was it one of those things that
meant you had to hide behind your car as you popped your head and
the camera up over the hood to get a quick shot or two due to
possible gunfire erupting in the immediate vicinity? Maybe it was a traffic
accident or a standard fire that did not have any threat of bodily
harm as far as the photographer was concerned, as long as you
stayed out of the way of traffic or of possible debris falling
off a burning building.

At any rate, the world of
news photography as I knew it
consisted of using a 35mm SLR and knowing how to use it well
enough to be able to set it up correctly without even thinking about it,
well before the advent of things like autofocus. Like driving a
car with a manual transmission, you had to know how to use the
camera under varying conditions without having to spend any time
thinking about it. You just did not get a second chance at getting
a decent shot in news photography, so you just had to know what
you were doing. When the perfect shot presented itself, you had
to be ready for it and already have your camera set up for the
conditions that prevailed.

One other thing that helped
was that
the papers I worked at had long since standardized on 400-speed
black and white film, normally Tri-X, which meant you didn't have
to fiddle around with changing the film dial setting, which
further meant you had one less thing to slow you down or foul
your operation up.

Now that digital cameras have
come into common use by
newspapers, you have auto-focus and a host of other advantages
built into the cameras that you did not have with the old SLR's,
but there is a downside to that.

Those new digital jobs rely
heavily on the use of microchips
to make the autofocus and other features operate. They also
depend heavily on batteries to keep enough power coming to make
all those features keep on working. I've managed to get to the
point where I have used film and digital cameras that relied
heavily on both microchips and batteries to keep them going, and
have had them fail at just the precise times that I could ill
afford them going out of service. Just when the right shot
presented itself, or when a couple extra shots would have rounded
out a series of shots that would have made a good photographic
presentation or feature, the microchips or the batteries have
gone out. When that happens, you are entirely up the creek without
a paddle, batteries or microchips. All your effort, or at least a
great part of it until the time the works was fouled up, has been
wasted.

Not so with the old mechanical cameras, like the Pentax K-
1000 with which I really learned to take photos. All you had in the way of
batteries with the Pentax K-1000 was a couple small wafer-like batteries that
powered the through-the-lens light meter. If those batteries went dead, all
that dropped out of operation was that light meter. With
enough experience you could guesstimate the lighting conditions
and camera settings so you could still get a decent photograph to
run in the next edition. If you didn't have enough experience to guesstimate
the settings against the available light, the little box the film came in had
some printed settings-to-available-light tips on it.

The old Pentax K-1000's could hold up to a hellish
amount of abuse. I have bounced them off the walls of a C-130
transport aircraft transport, used them in the middle of
rainstorms, and dragged them through the dust of the roads in
Honduras that was several inches thick, and they have never quit working.

When I finally got a film SLR
of my own, it was a Minolta
X-700 that was digitized to the extent you could use it manually
or semi-automatically. However, since I needed a second camera or
felt I did, I wound up getting a Vivitar manual SLR that was no
doubt the immediate predecessor to the V3800N I just bought from
that photography outfit in New York City. The price on that first
Vivitar I ever bought was $100 for the body and since it had a
K-mount the same as the Pentax K-1000's did, you could get plenty
of different used lenses at local pawnshops for not much money at all.

Like the Pentax K-1000, that
first Vivitar film camera was
manual in operation. One drawback to it was that it seemed to
be a bit more cheaply made. It had what seemed to be largely a
plastic body to it, though it was a bit more ergonomically
friendly than the K-1000's. That first Vivitar did not hold up as
well as the Pentax and sometimes the only thing that
worked for a money-strapped newsman was jury-rigging repairs on
your own.

The nice thing about that
first Vivitar I had was that
it still managed to come up with decent photographs, with the
proviso that the photographer held up his end of the canoe and
you used decent film in the camera. The price was also right at
the time, circa 1985 if my memory holds up.

Just off the top of my head,
I can still recall several
front page photos that accompanied stories I wrote that I took
with that original Vivitar. One was a shot of a family residence
in the boonies of Wetzel County, West Virginia, where several
members of one family had been murdered during a robbery. The
shot was taken during a jury view of the crime scene, which was
visited by jurors on a hot summer's day as they were hearing
evidence during a retrial of one of the defendants in the case. I
had parked my car about a quarter mile from the residence due to
poor road conditions and walked in, and got the shot from about
an eighth of a mile from the house with a 50mm lens on the
camera, and from an elevated vantage point on the road leading to
the house. It was one of those hurried shots that every news
photographer has to take, but it was certainly good
enough to run on the front pages of the morning and evening
newspapers in Wheeling, West Virginia.

The main point is that the
old Pentax and Vivitar 35mm film
SLR's were real sluggers for the photographer who had to, or still
has to, go out in the real world and get photographs that are
worth a damn under the worst conditions possible. Newspapers have
largely gone to the use of cheap digital cameras at present
due to the economics of photography. You buy a bunch of
pocket digital cameras for your reporters, have those reporters
set them on automatic, and you can get photos that will easily be
good enough to run in the newspaper. Sometimes you can get lucky
enough to have digital cameras that can produce photos as good as
the old film 35mm cameras. You really could tell the difference
between the images taken by a good photographer with a film
camera and a digital when the first digitals were coming into use
and did not have a high mega pixel count.

At present, the digitals have apparently caught up to the
film caught up to the film 35mms in terms of picture quality. But
if the batteries and the circuitry go out for any reason at all--rain, being dropped on concrete, battery exhaustion, or a host
of other reasons--the digitals are toast and you're out of luck
if you don't have a backup camera at hand. Normally newspapers
are not in the habit of supplying two cameras for each reporter,
so if you just carry one digital you better hope and pray that
digital, along with its batteries and circuits, stays in good condition.

When this old news reporter
saw that one brand-new Vivitar
advertised in the B&H catalog and made a quick telephone call, he
was mightily surprised to find out that the advertised film
camera would only cost him $170 including shipping and handling
from New York City to his town in Eastern Ohio. It also included
that 28 to 70mm lens, which was decent. After all, this
was several years after buying that original Vivitar body for
$100 and using inexpensive Pentax lenses from pawn shops on it. This
way you would have one camera and lens combination that you
would not be afraid to take anywhere, just like in the old days.

It took exactly two weeks
from the time the personal check
for $170 went out to B&H for the camera to arrive on the front
porch via UPS delivery. It was kind of like Christmas
opening the brown box
containing the camera and lens, and it was worth the effort.

First off, the lens had to be
put onto the camera body and
screwed on with a nice, solid, and satisfying "click.''
Apparently this lens was on to stay and there was no wiggle to it
after the "click'' came and went.In contrast to that first
Vivitar, this one felt
heavier, as if it has more metal construction than plastic to it.
It just seems heavier and solider.

Apparently, since Vivitar has
a liberal policy toward
what constitutes a kit camera, there were a few things that I
considered extra packed into the brown UPS box along with the
camera and the lens. There was a nice-looking
camera strap, mostly blue with a
white stripe. There were also a couple of wafer-type batteries
included to run the through-the-lens light meter with, which you
normally had to pay extra for when you bought a camera body at a
retail camera store back in the heyday of the 35mm film cameras.
Moreover, lo and behold, there was a lens shroud, which is one of
those things I had never seen or used before. The mystery of
the strange appliance was solved by searching the term
"lens shroud'' on the Internet and soon enough the shroud wound
up being screwed onto the end of the 28-70 zoom lens.

The first evening was spent reading the manual and
inspecting the camera to become reacquainted with the controls of
a film SLR. It has been a few years since I used one, and in the
meantime have passed on to using a Pentax ZX-M film camera and a
Fujifilm digital at 8.5 mega pixels. I was surprised that the
intervening years had caused my memories of the controls of a
fully mechanical camera to fade, and I had to have a bit of a
refresher course to reacquaint myself with how everything worked.

One interesting thing was the
specifications page at the
rear of the small instruction manual. Lo and behold, this camera
is truly all mechanical. Even the shutter release is mechanical,
meaning that I got exactly what I wanted. With this camera, you
do not have to rely on the batteries to make anything work except
for the light meter. Some 35mm film cameras are billed as
mechanical cameras but have an electronic shutter release instead
of a mechanical one. This means the shutter as well as the light
meter works off batteries, instead of a mechanical setup. It
also means that the shutter locks up when the batteries
die or go low on power for some other reason, such as extremely
cold weather. It is another electronic component to be fried
by extremely high temperatures or any other reason.

The next morning found the
camera loaded with a roll of 400-
speed color film. It seemed that the first few frames of the
first couple rolls were kind of hard to roll onto the take-up
spindle inside the camera, but that apparently was my fault in
having forgotten that one needs to make sure the sprocket holes
on the edge of the film mate up with the sprocket wheels
inside the camera before advancing the film. Once that was done
the take-up smoothed right out.

The test drive of the Vivitar
came during a beautiful Fall
day just before the winter weather started in the Ohio Valley in
the middle of November. A trip to the Pike Island locks and dam
on the Ohio River was arranged, and that trip's outcome told me
that the Vivitar is perfectly capable of getting decent photos as
it came from B&H.

The photos of the dam were
all shot at varying telephoto
settings, which necessitated changes in focus to a small extent
due to lens focal length, and the shots all came out fine, crisp and clear. A
couple shots of the car also came out fine
despite a brightly sunlit day, with the car shots being taken at
a 28mm wide angle lens setting just off the car's nose. I was
satisfied with the photographic results that the Vivitar produced.

There were a couple
drawbacks. First, the first couple of rolls of film being cranked onto the
take-up spool have been a bit rough for the first few cranks of
the take-up handle, but that was my fault. Also, the
little rubber eyepiece that fits onto the aft part of the
viewfinder was on the loose side. In fact, it actually dropped
right off the camera when I turned the camera upside down. I
decided I didn't really need that loose of a fitting on the aft
end of the viewfinder and tossed it into the camera bag,
where it will probably stay indefinitely. I can certainly see
through the viewfinder fine without it attached, and no doubt
will be able to get photos without it.

Thirdly, a K-type bayonet
lens that works perfectly and fits
tightly on the ZX-M feels a bit loose in the Vivitar's mount. The reason for
that could be one of a
number of things, like differing manufacturing tolerances from
one lens maker to another. The Vivitar, incidentally, came with a
Vivitar lens while you normally have to buy the lens extra when
you get only the camera body. That Vivitar lens fit that new
Vivitar camera perfectly, nice and tight. Apparently, Vivitar
takes manufacturing tolerances between their cameras and lenses
into account, since the Vivitar lens fit the new Viv camera very well.

In looking up the Vivitar
V3800N SLR on the Internet, I have
found conflicting reports on it from other persons who have owned them. Some swear by them while
others swear at them. However, it seemed from a quick perusal of a limited
amount of reports available that most persons were happy with the
results they got for the money they put out. In short, they
generally felt they got good pictures from a very reasonably
priced camera. Moreover, I was satisfied with the
way the Vivitar handles, operates and takes photographs.

Some gripes in that one
magazine article had to do with the
lack of what one would call optional features and amenities in
the photographic world, such as autofocus, auto wind and the like.
Other persons, a very small minority, had bad things to say about
something going wrong with the Vivitar they bought and customer
service from the manufacturer not being up to what they
considered a decent standard. I never have had any gripe with the lack of those
optional features on a straight mechanical film camera, since they are things
that tend to go wrong at the worst time. The Vivitar also feels sturdy enough
to last forever, or at least still be going strong after I give out.

Most of the persons reviewing
the camera said they had
bought it for a basic photography instruction course, and that it
filled that role very well. Others said that they were satisfied
with the camera and its performance well enough that they were
considering it as first-line photography equipment.

What do I think? I think this
one is a big advance on the earlier Vivitar 35mm
SLR I once owned. It seems sturdier, it feels better in the
hand and it takes equally good photos. The 28-70mm lens seems a bit "slower''
than what I've been used to for some reason, to the point where you
really need more light than other makes of zooms to get the thing
to work in low light conditions. However, when you are working with ASA 400 film in
broad daylight when the sun is out, all the way from 28 to 70mm
settings on the lens, you get good pictures out of the camera.

When you boil it all down,
the old mechanical 35mm film
cameras filled the photographic niche that cried out for a
relatively fast-operating camera that you could take literally
anywhere and not have it fail you. I never used any of the older
Speed Graphic cameras, but since the manual 35mm cameras had
superseded the Speed Graphics by the time I started being a news
reporter in 1968, chances are the 35mm cameras did the job faster
and in other ways better than the old Speed Graphics did.

The pocket Fujifilm digital
camera I began using just last
summer and the Pentax ZX-M 35mm film camera I still use have
certain advantages over the old manuals. The Pentax, for
instance, is just short of being completely automated with its built-
in film advance and rewind motor, and its ability to operate in
any of three different operating modes. All you have to do when
it is set to Program mode is set the appropriate zoom setting on
the lens and make sure it is focused okay. The digital is even
more advanced, since it also features autofocus and has a handy
little gadget surrounding the firing button that zooms the lens
and you don't have the initial cost of film purchase
or the cost of developing and printing film. All you have to do
with the digital is upload the images onto your computer and
email them off to whoever wants to use them. In short, cameras
have become a lot easier for the average person to operate since
1968 when I first became exposed to photography.

As noted, the old mechanical
35mm cameras had their
niche and they still do. We have to remember that all it takes to
bring a largely battery-run camera to the point of being dead in
its tracks is a completely discharged set of batteries, or to be
operating in a place where the temperatures are so low that the
batteries simply don't put out enough current to make all the
different gewgaws on the camera work.

Picture this, if you will
excuse the choice of words, you are
out on a shooting expedition with a digital camera some fifty
miles from nowhere and have just started firing away when your
camera flashes the warning signal at you that indicates you have
just a couple more images to go before the batteries are
completely dead. You check in the camera bag or your pocket and
discover that the spare batteries at back at the house
approximately 75 miles away. In the meantime, you know in your
heart that the award-winning shot you have been shooting at is
fading fast with the available light as sunset is coming on
rapidly. Surely, that shot is not going to be there in the morning
when you come back with a set of new batteries in the digital
camera.

Now, if you had a mechanical 35mm film camera
in a situation like that, you wouldn't have to sweat the situation. When the batteries on
the old mechanicals go dead, all that stops working is the light
meter. Anybody with any experience at all with a straight
mechanical camera can use that experience to tell them what
settings will put the camera into the ball park of getting a
decent shot out of the available light even with a dead light
meter. Alternatively, you can have a handheld light meter in your camera bag.
If you do not have that, the little box your film came in normally
has instructions inside on what settings to use in different lighting
conditions. Read those instructions and set the dials accordingly.

When utter reliability is the
goal, a straight mechanical
film camera is the thing to reach for when you absolutely,
positively have to come back with some photos in hand. It appears that this new
rendition of an older type of
camera is going to be a constant companion when this old writer
and photographer goes out the door for practically anything,
especially when getting some photos is the objective of the trip.
It feels sturdy enough to hold up like a Pentax K-1000, which is
no longer in production, and always comes up with a decent
photograph.

If you have a digital camera,
and depend on it to provide
you with the pleasure of photography as a hobby or to keep you in
an income as a professional photographer, you might consider
getting one of those old mechanical film cameras as a backup.
After all, you never know when something could go wrong with the
digital and when it does, it is usually at the worst time.

I guess I fit into the
category of person who plans to make a mechanical film camera his or her
standard for photography, especially under adverse conditions. The Pentax and
the Fujifilm can do the picture taking under easy conditions, but when things
get bad, I'll reach for the Vivitar.